CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER EIGHT
D IONI SHOT TO her feet, swiftly if not at all elegantly, because she had never seen that look on her brother’s face before.
“What does it look like, Apostolis?” she demanded, something like a sob constricting her chest. Because she was terrified that he might rush Alceu at any moment, turning this into something violent. And then what would she do? The very idea of the two men she loved most in the world at each other’s throats made her feel sick, and yet, hadn’t she known all along that this moment would happen—sooner or later? Wasn’t that why she’d run off to New York City in the first place? She tried to draw Apostolis’s attention, scowling at him. “And why are you asking him? I am very clearly the one pregnant.”
Her brother turned that arrogant, astonished, furious glare on her. “This is impossible. Tell me I am misunderstanding what I’m seeing, Dioni. Tell me this cannot be what it looks like.”
Beside him, Jolie murmured something that Dioni couldn’t hear. And she wanted nothing more than to look at her friend to make certain that they, at least, were all right, or could be all right—but she didn’t dare look away from her brother.
Her heart sank as he continued to glare at her. That sob in her chest started to hurt . Because she had spent all of her life being protected by Apostolis. He had cared for her. Looked out for her. He had always treated her as if she was a kind of delight to him, a light in an otherwise dark family story. He had protected her all these years, and never once in all that time could she recall him being anything like disappointed in her.
She did not think she could bear it.
But she was not a little girl any longer. She would always be his little sister but she was fully grown, married, and soon to be a mother. Shortly she would be raising her own child and the truth was, though she loved her brother dearly, he had not been her parent. He had shouldered those responsibilities in many ways, yes, but he should not have had to take care of her like that.
That he’d had to do so anyway didn’t change the facts of things.
Or how those facts had changed.
And Dioni was a woman, not a child, who had astonishingly vast love inside of her for her husband that she would not get over no matter how angry Apostolis was about it.
None of this was his business, though she wouldn’t have minded his blessing.
And even as her heart sank, another part of her was glad, because now he knew. And now Jolie knew, too. Whether it was painful or not in this moment, it was a relief. Everything was out in the open and that meant there’d be no more hiding—the way she’d been doing since not long after the night of her brother’s wedding. And had certainly been doing since she’d come to Sicily.
Almost , something in her whispered then, as if Alceu had intended to keep all of this a secret all this while. Because she didn’t think he’d had any plan in place to introduce the fact of their marriage and impending parenthood to anyone, not even Apostolis, at any point. If he did, he’d never mentioned it to her.
Maybe they had both wanted to preserve Apostolis’s good opinion of them as long as possible.
But she couldn’t worry about that now. She kept her gaze on her brother and reminded herself that this needed to happen. She regretted that they had to go through this first, but it was the only way.
Alceu was Apostolis’s best friend. She was the little sister she suspected he still saw as a girl. There had never been any version of this moment that wouldn’t come with tension.
Dioni opened her mouth to lay it all out for her brother and her own best friend when, beside her, Alceu stood. To her surprise—and, she could admit, a rush of pleasure—he wrapped his hand around the nape of her neck.
A sign of possessiveness that made everything inside her...dance.
He might as well have set off a bomb. Apostolis’s gaze went blank, then wide.
Then even darker.
Beside him, Jolie smiled.
“Dioni and I are married,” Alceu announced in his forbidding way. “We are expecting our son in a couple of months and I know you will both join us in celebrating this great joy.”
There was another deep, intense silence.
Dioni could hear her own heartbeat, like a drum. She could feel his hand on her neck and the way the heat of him coursed through her until she had to repress a shiver.
And for a moment, it was as if the four of them were frozen into place, as incapable of moving as if they were carved from ice. She might have thought she was if it weren’t for Alceu’s hand on her neck.
But then the ice shattered and everything got loud.
Her brother was shouting. Alceu was not shouting back, but he wasn’t backing down, either.
“All this time you were nothing more than a snake in the grass,” Apostolis threw at him, after a spate of furious and insulting Greek that Dioni hoped neither Alceu nor Jolie could follow. “I trusted you!”
“I have no excuse,” Alceu replied after a moment, sounding...if not precisely unbothered , then certainly not bursting with the sort of certainty about the two of them she might have liked to hear in this moment. She tried to tell herself she was imagining it as he continued. “The fault is mine.”
Clearly she was not imagining it. That fatalistic tone of his that made everything in her curl up in a tight bristle.
Dioni turned to stare at him. And she was aware as she did that she was more upset with that cool, emotionless statement than with the yelling, suggesting she wasn’t quite right herself. She found she didn’t care. “The fault is yours? As if you did this by yourself?”
Both her husband and her brother ignored her, making that bristling, thorny thing inside her seem to sink its claws in deeper.
“You defiled her,” Apostolis went on, and that he was quieter did not make it any better to hear her brother say such a thing. As if she was unclean, which was a problem for him even though he wasn’t looking at her, but at Alceu. “I’ve spent my life taking care of her, and I thought you understood that. What it meant. Why I did it. And yet all the while, you were just as bad as your own—”
“He did not seduce me or take advantage of me in any way,” Dioni broke in, before he finished that sentence the way she feared he would. “Quite the opposite. If you cared that much about it, maybe you should have paid more attention to what was going on around you while you were pretending to hate Jolie at your wedding.”
“At my wedding,” her brother repeated, taking a step toward Alceu, looking even more murderous than before. “You stood up for me. You were my best man.”
Tension emanated out from Apostolis and an eruption seemed inevitable—but Alceu, again, only inclined his head. “There’s nothing I can say to explain away these facts, I am afraid.”
Apostolis stepped closer and Dioni moved forward as if she thought she could personally intercept him with her body.
Well. What she thought was that she would intercept him and he would have to toss her to the ground to get past her. She did not think that even now, even in this state, he would do that.
“What is the matter with you?” she demanded, loudly, of her hero. The brother she had looked up to, always, and had never had so much as a single harsh word for in all her life. Maybe later, when this moment was solved and lived through, she would mourn the loss of that innocence along with all the rest. “Can you hear yourself, Apostolis? This is your best friend. Your business partner. He is, and has always been, a good and honorable man who you yourself have always said you would trust with your life. And have.”
When Alceu made a noise beside her, she waved her hand at him, dismissively. “We are not entertaining your family’s obsession with making themselves out to be the most evil people who have ever eviled. We’re talking about reality.”
She looked back at her brother and pointed her finger at him. “Did I scream at you when you decided to marry my best friend?”
Apostolis looked as if she’d plunged a knife straight into his heart. She felt as if she had, and couldn’t say she enjoyed the sensation, but she didn’t back down.
“That’s completely different,” her brother protested.
“Completely,” came Jolie’s arch voice, then. Her husband turned to look at her as if she was holding a second knife, yet all she did was lift a shoulder, the very picture of elegant nonchalance. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten that Dioni and I are the same age. You certainly do not treat me as if I’m an infant.”
Jolie ignored Apostolis’s glare and moved forward to take Dioni’s hands in hers, gripping her tight. “Congratulations. I am delighted. So is he, or he will be, when he comes to terms with the idea that you have not been a seven-year-old girl in need of a hand to hold in quite some time.”
And it wasn’t until her friend hugged her, hard, that Dioni realized that she was long overdue for a big, long, messy sob. This, clearly, seemed like the very worst and very best moment to give in to that urge.
But she couldn’t hold it in. So she...let it out, heedlessly.
She buried her face in her hands and let the tears fall as they would.
Dioni cried and cried. She cried for a good long while. Because her best friend was here and her brother knew and everything was tense and broken, but she had to believe that it was better.
Even if it didn’t feel anything like better .
And she had been pregnant forever. She was huge and uncomfortable and unwieldy, but she had also never felt more beautiful in all her life. And she was having a son. She would be holding a chubby little fist in hers soon enough, and she adored him already though she hadn’t even met him yet, and she wanted his life to be as beautiful as she could make it no matter if he hadn’t been planned.
And she was so in love with her husband that she couldn’t see straight. It got worse by the day. Every time he touched her. Every time he looked at her. Every time he said her name, it made her love him more and made that stillness, that certainty that she was in the right place with the right person, expand within her—but he wanted only to take responsibility for her.
For her and the child they’d made.
And that wasn’t the same thing at all.
When she looked up again, Jolie had cleared the library of men. She had steered Dioni back down to the sofa. Now she sat beside Dioni and kept her arm tight around her friend’s shoulders, the way she had always done. The way Dioni had done for her, too, on the few occasions either one of them gave in to emotion.
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t try to rush Dioni through the storm. Jolie sat with her and helped her weather it.
It hurt to think how long it had been since they’d seen each other. It hurt.
“Well,” Dioni said ruefully as the last of the tears subsided, wiping at her face. “That went about as hideously as I expected it would.”
“I think,” Jolie said with great confidence and a squeeze, “that when the smoke clears, we’ll all find this very funny. It’s the surprise of it all that’s overshadowing everything at the moment, but that won’t last. You must know that the two of you are his favorite people. It will dawn on him that there could be no better man for his sister than Alceu.” She smiled. “And if it does not, I will be certain to hasten that dawn along.”
A rush of something sharper than simple guilt washed over her then, and Dioni turned toward her friend so she could look at her full-on. “I wanted to tell you a thousand times. I wrote you letters, sometimes five times a day. I’ve saved them all on my mobile, but I never sent them.”
“I wish you had,” Jolie said simply.
There were no recriminations. No expressions of hurt feelings. That was all she said.
But it was enough.
That guilt didn’t go away, but it was gentler, then.
Dioni let out a sigh. “I couldn’t tell you, much as I wanted to. It was right after your wedding, and things were not... I wasn’t sure how things were between you and Apostolis. I didn’t want to tell him, so I couldn’t bring you into this and worry that you’d feel you had to tell him.”
“I wouldn’t have told him,” Jolie protested. But she considered that for a moment. “To be honest, I’m not sure what I would have done. I’ve kept secrets from him before. I don’t know that I ever will again. But I suppose the real question is, why were you afraid to tell him?” She frowned. “Did you think that he would stop loving you, Dioni? He might rant and rage, but he would do anything for you. Surely you must know this.”
And so Dioni poured it all out to the one person she thought would understand, as she had long wished she could. That she knew that he would try to fix it. That she needed to fix it herself, whatever that looked like. That her brother was wonderful, but if she was going to be the mother of a human being—and it appeared she was, and rather soon—she really, truly, needed to sort this all out for herself.
“I thought I would simply live off in America for as long as possible, then present a fully grown child to him when I came home and refuse to answer questions,” she said. When Jolie laughed, she shrugged. “I planned to be mysterious for the rest of my life because I certainly had no intention of telling Alceu about any of this. And if I didn’t tell him, why would I tell anyone?”
When her friend made a face at that, as if not wanting to tell Alceu was an unreasonable position, she explained. How that night—Jolie’s wedding night—had gone. The things he said. The fact that he had used the word pity .
“I would not have told him either,” Jolie said, rolling her eyes. She let out a laugh. “Men.”
Dioni nodded, more relief washing through her then, because Jolie understood exactly how crushing it had been. To be pitied when she had been wildly and madly in love. “Imagine my surprise when he appeared in New York in all his state, as if I had gotten pregnant on purpose to spite him, and demanded that I marry him.”
“I can imagine that.” Jolie smiled, sitting back against the sofa. “Just as I can imagine that you somehow failed to mention to him that you’ve been in love with him for the whole of your life.”
“Not in love ,” Dioni corrected her, flushing slightly. “Have I had a certain tenderness toward him? Yes. Have I been, at certain times, preoccupied with him? Also yes. But what do those things amount to, in the end?”
“Apparently, they amount to a wedding and baby boy, though not necessarily in that order.”
They both laughed then, leaning into each other as they did, and it was suddenly as if there had been no separation between them. Dioni talked her friend through every detail of the last seven months. And in her turn, Jolie told her how things were going at the Hotel Andromeda, and in her marriage, and all the secrets that she was no longer keeping because she and Apostolis had truly found their way at last.
“You seem happy,” Dioni said, when that had never been something Jolie had expected or even aspired to. “Are you truly happy?”
“I am finally living up to my name,” Jolie said, and she looked it.
And it was a gift, Dioni thought, to lose herself in something other than her own worries and daydreams and fears, for a change.
“You have always been the most optimistic person,” Jolie said much, much later. “It’s inspiring. I have to imagine that this might all work out all right.”
“For you, I’m sure it will.” Dioni shook her head. “What I worry is that Alceu truly believes that he’s a villain. No matter what he does, he is certain that his true nature will take hold.”
Hadn’t she seen it earlier? In that fatalistic manner he’d adopted, as if he wanted Apostolis to take a swing at him? Or would not have been surprised if he had?
It had her skin feeling too tight, all over.
“I’m no expert on the subject,” her friend said after a moment. “But what I can tell you about love—or what I know of it in the short time I’ve experienced it—is that it must be built on forgiveness or it is something else entirely. I don’t mean that if he is hideous you should bear that. I mean that he must forgive himself. For whatever he imagines he has done or might do, just as you must do the same. Just as all of us must see ourselves in the mirror and understand the truth we’re looking at. Because I think, in the end, that’s what intimacy demands. We must see ourselves to truly see each other.”
And Dioni told herself there was no reason for that notion to make her want to sob again, for hours.
There was no sign of Apostolis or Alceu, so as night fell, Dioni took Jolie out into the bright green courtyard that took on a deeper emerald in the last of the light. And they ate their dinner there, while the stars slowly came into view. They talked late into the night, the way they had in school and the way they had sometimes when they’d lived at the hotel together.
The way Dioni had believed, in New York, they never would again.
As if they could do as they pleased. As if there was nothing but time.
As if the only thing that mattered was the joy they took in each other’s company, the stories they told, and the space they held for each other.
“Like sisters,” she said, leaning back to look at the Milky Way sprawled out above them.
“Like sisters,” Jolie agreed, pressing her shoulder to Dioni’s.
And so, by the time she found her way to bed, Dioni felt brand-new.
Remade.
More than capable of finally telling her husband that she loved him, like it or not.
Assuming, of course, that Apostolis hadn’t killed him before she could.